Vilka språkliga färdigheter utvecklas genom olika metoder och aktiviteter i förskolan? Vad kan vi egentligen förvänta oss av barns språkliga förmåga under deras förskoletid? Och hur kan vi ge språkligt stöd utifrån vår kunskap om språkets struktur och barns utveckling?

Begreppet "språkutvecklande arbetssätt i förskolan" innefattar tre centrala delar - språk, utveckling och arbetssätt - och i Barns språkutveckling vävs dessa samman till en helhet. Här ges insikter om språkets olika beståndsdelar, om barns språkutveckling samt om hur didaktiska metoder kan stimulera språket ur flera perspektiv. Syftet är att stödja både yrkesverksamma förskollärare och studenter att knyta relevant teori till det dagliga arbetet med barns språk och kommunikation.

Språkexponeringen behöver hålla hög kvalitet och utgå från både barnets befintliga språknivå och dess fortsatta utveckling. Barns språkutveckling vänder sig till dig som vill arbeta medvetet och systematiskt med språk i förskolans praktik - med ett helhetsperspektiv på vad språk är och hur det kan främjas.

Vad är det som efter många år fortfarande lockar förskollärare, pedagoger och forskare inom förskolefältet att inspireras av lyssnandets pedagogik i sina praktiker i Sverige och Norge? Vad är lyssnandets pedagogik för dem i dag, i praktiken och i teorin? Hur ska vi förstå vad som hände då och vad som händer nu i olika kontexter som kan utgöras också av två grannationer? Vad har lyssnande pedagogik betytt för förskolans framväxt och med särskilt fokus på Sverige och Norge där Ann Åbergs texter fått ett stort genomslag? Detta är frågor vi ställde oss och ville få svar på när vi efterlyste bidrag till detta specialnummer av tidskriften Nordisk Barnehageforskning på temat Lyssnandets pedagogik. Ett tjugotal forskare svarade och efter en, på grund av pandemin, utdragen och rigorös review-process publiceras nu elva artiklar i detta temanummer. Tillsammans avspeglar de en angelägen bredd i intresset för vad lyssnandets pedagogik är i dag och kan bli i framtiden.

Children's language development is a core task in Swedish preschool and central to how educators organize teaching and everyday activities. The curriculum's definition of language is described as extended, with language as both a prerequisite for learning and a learning effect, i.e. both internal processes and communication. This means that working methods and didactic strategies rely on many different epistemologies and thus different theoretical perspectives. Nevertheless, the research literature, as well as assessments of Swedish preschool services, show that educators' interpretation of the curriculum is primarily socioculturally oriented. This does not entirely converge with how language is conceptualized in the Swedish preschool curriculum. Against this background, the aim of this paper is to perform a theoretical and empirical investigation of the extended language concept in the curriculum with the intention to understand what the consequences of this extended meaning of language produce in terms of teaching and learning practices. I have traced various epistemologies in language didactic preschool research and related this tracing analysis to empirical examples from preschool practices. The results of my analysis show that the practices are predominantly interpersonally framed, which corresponds to the emphasis in research. In a further analysis, where empirical examples are read from other possible epistemologies, the practices can be perceived as being multi-epistemological in a fashion which corresponds to the curriculum's conceptualization of language. This is discussed as an opportunity for a didactic strengthening of presently neglected perspectives.

Förskolan måste kunna undervisa både gruppen och individen. För att klara av det behövs en mångfald av teorier om kunskap och lärande. Här fyller neuropedagogiken en viktig funktion för att bredda perspektiven.

Neuropedagogik handlar om att omsätta den kunskap vi har om hur hjärna och nervsystem fungerar i den pedagogiska praktiken för att exempelvis stärka impulskontrollen eller arbetsminnet hos barnen. Genom att ta in detta perspektiv breddas den vetenskapliga grunden i förskolan och bidrar till större möjlighet att anpassa arbetssätten, med hänsyn till både gruppens och individens lärande och utveckling. Även en större medvetenhet hos barnen själva om hur ”hjärnkontoret” styr allt från kroppsrörelser till tankar och känslor kan bidra till utveckling av exempelvis självreglering och empati.

Boken ger en teoretisk kunskapsgrund som tillsammans med konkreta inblickar från förskolans vardag i samband med exempelvis samling, språkutvecklingsarbete och konfliktlösning ger guidning till fler tolkningsmöjligheter och ett större pedagogiskt och didaktiskt handlingsutrymme.Vidare diskuteras hur denna mångfald påverkar undervisningsansvaret och därmed även utvecklingen av förskolan.

Connecting neuroscience and education is a desire in contemporary society, related to the recur- ring calls for education to become more evidence-based. Research in educational neuroscience strives towards such interdisciplinary knowledge production and to an enhanced interaction between neuroscience research and educational practice. However, various problems and difficul- ties in achieving these collaborations are often reported. Discrepancies, hierarchies, misconcep- tions and communication problems can be described as creating a ‘discourse of difficulty’. The aim of this paper is to trace the specific difficulties that have created this discourse, and to problematize these difficulties in ways that enable new conceptions of what might be entailed by interaction and mutual knowledge development between the fields of neuroscience and education, and between academic theory and educational practice. The most significant difficulty is caused by a binary understanding of the concept of difference in relation to understanding the fields. Instead of understanding the fields in opposition to each other, I will suggest an understanding that implies difference emerging in each of the collaborating fields as the self-differing effects of the encounter. In the concluding discussion, I will argue that an understanding of the concept of difference as a process of mutual transformation can be essential for reciprocity and bi-directionality in collabo- rations. Instead of producing contradictions and hierarchies between scientific fields and between theory and practice, such an understanding of difference might facilitate an investigation of the polarizations that always position something as of lesser value, and ultimately, creates the gaps that collaborations want to bridge.

This doctoral thesis in Early Childhood Education reports on encounters between the theories and practices of Swedish preschool and research-based neuroscience knowledge. Thus, this thesis concerns epistemological encounters and didactic consequences. The scientific problem pertains to the relation between scientifically generated knowledge and educational practices in preschool, with specific attention to the requirement that preschool, as the first level in the Swedish education system, should be based on scientific knowledge and verified experience-based knowledge. The didactic problem emerging from this scientific problem concerns how this might affect the daily practices of responsible preschool teachers and educators at large.

The thesis adopts a relational ontology with a multi-epistemological and methodological approach, based primarily on Stengers’ (e.g., 2018) and Mols’ (e.g., 2002) respective scholarship. The aims of the thesis are to investigate, firstly; what is produced in epistemological encounters within and between the research fields of Early Childhood Education and neuroscience. Secondly; what is produced between these fields and preschool didactic practices. The focus for the latter is on the didactic practices relying on the extended language concept in the Swedish preschool curriculum.

To explore these aims in more detail, a series of so-called cartography mapping exercises have been conducted. On the one hand, in the analyses of the literature aimed at bringing the two fields together. On the other hand, cartography mapping has been conducted with educators in three preschools collaboratively analyzing their literacy practices. The Deleuze-inspired (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) methodology of cartography mapping aspire to simultaneously critically deconstruct and productively experiment with underlying lines of thinking emerging from scientific or philosophical problems that concern development and learning, and especially language development and skills of literacy during the preschool years (Lenz Taguchi, 2016a, 2016b).

The knowledge that this thesis produces is summarized below. Cartography mapping can be used both as a research method and as a method in pedagogical practice. In addition, cartography mapping can accommodate issues in different epistemologies and in different practices, such as research practice and preschool didactic practice. That is, practices that are related and share an overarching aim, but which are nevertheless not the same. The method reveals the different epistemologies present and how they can operate simultaneously within preschool didactic practice. The results from the thesis support the Swedish preschool curriculum goals which encompasses a dual assignment of learning (group and individual), that require different epistemological and didactic methods to be fulfilled.

A preschool practice based on scientific evidence and verified experience-based knowledge thus requires the use of a wide range of theories and epistemologies to guide preschool staff. Hence, the results of this thesis show not just the presence, but also the possibility of developing a multi-epistemological didactic repertoire in preschool development and learning practices.

This presentation takes its starting point in curiosity among preschool teachers and staff in a municipality outside Stockholm, about what the neurosciences might have to offer their practices of literacy education.  Deriving from an invitation from practitioners to researchers, a project was designed based on a shared agreement on a ‘joint matter of concern’ (Stengers, 2008, Lenz Taguchi, 2017). The agreement was to explore what the encounter with neuroscientific knowledge might do (or not) to everyday practices, and what possible beneficial effects this might have.

The study was organized in periods when the researcher was alternately participating in everyday preschool practices and in staff meetings. Documentations of children´s activities, made by the teachers and the researcher, were discussed and reflected upon during the staff meetings, together with excerpts from neuroscientific research. Major lines of articulation, converging around a core problem concerning the didactic conflicts between enhancing learning processes in the group and individual children respectively, were collaboratively constructed and put on the ‘map’. These were then actively put to play to be disrupted and deterritorialized, making ways for new diverging lines and potential reconfigured forms of literacy practices.

These encounters between neuroscience and preschool practices were performed as collaborative cartography mapping exercises, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. When enacting these exercises during staff meetings, the dominating lines of articulation that seemed to inform the practices as well as the research excerpts were brought to the fore to creatively experiment with.

For example, the previously common hesitation towards psychology could be reconfigured when encountering neuroscientific findings of children’s reoccurring cycles of learning and development as complex and unpredictable patterns (Fischer, 2011). Importantly, the rupturing and reconfigurations was different for different teachers, depending on what theories that was taught when they were educated. Another example of a deterritorialization with theoretical as well as didactic implications was how neuroscientific research on brain plasticity constituted a diverging line from the classic and troubling nature-nurture binary. The weary question about the extent to which genetic disposition, or the nurturing social circumstances, play the more significant role than the other, could eventually be replaced with discussing how nature-nurture might rather be intrinsically entangled and co-constituted.

The collaborative cartography mapping performed in this study shows that it is possible to reconfigure dominant lines of thinking in new productive and empowering ways together with preschool staff. This methodology is essentially about materializing theories of science and learning in a way that is situated and closely connected to the practices. Moreover, it also makes possible a practice of extending the didactic repertoire, contrary to having to choose the ‘better’ epistemology and method for teaching.

This paper takes its starting point in a shared problem of concern, formulated in terms of what might be produced – or not – as effects of encounters between neuroscientific research and preschool practices. The aim is to show what emerged in collaborative encounters, in what is theorized and practised as Deleuzo–Guattarian-inspired cartography mapping exercises. During regularly scheduled staff ‘reflection meetings’, an invited doctoral student enacted, participated, and documented these encounters with preschool staff at three preschools in the same area outside Stockholm, Sweden. Two major lines of articulation, converging around a core problem, were collaboratively constructed and put on this ‘map’. These were then actively put to play to be disrupted and deterritorialized, making ways for new diverging lines and potential reconfigured forms of literacy practices.

Starting from Deleuze and Guattari‘s remark that concepts are unstable and moving assemblages of components, producing rather than representing, this article asks what the concept of transversal/-ity might be and do. The question originated from a doctoral course on Deleuzian research methodologies and transversal writing, and is basically the way I, as a confused first-year doctoral student, tried to grasp the concept. In this paper, I return to and reuse my notes from the course and a text message conversation with a colleague in which we experimented with the transversality concept in order to compose a meaningful account. By putting to work a grammatical investigation of the concept of transversality, I ask what it is, what it can be, and what it will do. Guided by a destabilising grammar, the possible practices of transversality are unfolded from the co-constitution of my notes and various texts, events, and phenomena. Finally, I reflect upon the usefulness of this exercise, in relation to the aim of composing a meaningful account and the obligation to justify scientific knowledge pro duction. These practices of destabilising by grammar, connecting texts and experiences, and reflecting on meaning-making are both the methodology of the paper and, at the same time, the result. Hence, research processes can sometimes be vague and uncertain, but still worth a try.

Med utgångspunkt i Deleuze och Guattaris påpekande att begrepp är instabila och rörliga sammansättningar av komponenter, producerande snarare än representerande, frågar den här artikeln vad begreppet transversal/-itet kan vara och göra. Frågan har sitt ursprung i en doktorandkurs om Deleuziska forskningsmetoder och transversalt skrivande, och är i grund och botten det sätt på vilket jag som förvirrad första-års -doktorand försökte förstå begreppet. I denna artikel återvänder jag till, och återanvänder, mina anteckningar från kursen och en sms-konversation med en kollega, där vi experimenterade med transversalitetsbegreppet för att skapa en meningsfull förståelse. Genom att göra en grammatisk undersökning av begreppet transversalitet kan jag fråga vad det är, vad det kan vara och vad det ska göra. Vägledd av en destabiliserande grammatik kommer möjliga transversalitetspraktiker att vecklas ut från sammanflätningen av mina anteckningar och olika texter, händelser och fenomen. Slutligen kommer jag att reflektera över användbarheten av denna övning i förhållande till avsikten att skapa en meningsfull förståelse och skyldigheten att motivera den vetenskapliga kunskapsproduktionen. Dessa praktiker av att destabilisera genom grammatik, koppla samman texter och erfarenheter och reflektera över meningsskapande är både artikelns metodik och samtidigt resultatet. Ibland kan forskningsprocesser således vara vaga och osäkra, men ändå värda ett försök.

Since the millennium, the emergent discipline of Educational Neuroscience has grown rapidly. This transdiscipline aims to bridge the gap between the neurosciences and educational practices, not only to let the neurosciences inform educational practices but also for educational practices to provide new relevant questions for the neurosciences (Fischer et al, 2007). The joint aim is to improve educational practices for future generations. As a researcher in Early Childhood Education with an interest in how knowledge practices are material-discursively produced, I was triggered to do something about this lack of knowledge. What would emerge if brain research became part of the literacy theories and practices of Swedish preschool teachers? Would it be possible to enact a reciprocal and collaborative research methodology together with the practitioners, based on a joint matter of concern? I felt an urge to explore this and in this presentation, I will highlight some methodological implications in this project.

Researching a problem that ultimately concerns the possibilities, difficulties and problems which emerge in the encounters of two different practices – scientific research practices and educational practices – demands a methodology that engages in the practice of research practices and the problem of how to overcome divisions between humanities, social science and natural sciences (Sismondo, 2004) Hence, the research questions concern how the different disciplines’ power production is negotiated and re-negotiated in the encounter, and what the consequences are for teachers constituted and re-constituted beliefs, theories and practices (Callard & Fitzgerald, 2015). Questions on how this encounter is received, resisted, and in what ways this kind of knowing transforms meaning-making and practices concerning the literacy work performed was an urgent issue in the participating preschools as well. Hence, based on shared matters of concern of the researcher and the participants is a methodology needed that is characterized by reciprocity and collaboration.